


Danse Macabre

by wonder_at_unlawful_things



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen, Major character death - Freeform, dark!Will, will snaps but not how you thought he would
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 10:06:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wonder_at_unlawful_things/pseuds/wonder_at_unlawful_things
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will wakes up with a clear mind and a clear purpose. Hannibal Lecter never saw THIS coming, and Will doesn't like being a sociopath's toy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Danse Macabre

Will Graham is used to simultaneously understanding people completely and not understanding them at all. He knows what flows under the surface, why people do what they do, what ancient scars propel them and what they see, what they hope for. But the present moment, the interaction— that he can’t fathom, because it’s all so false, so facile. He gets confused, forgets at what depth it is acceptable for him to know another.   
He likes Hannibal Lecter because he is a mirror. All surface. Flat, silver, reflective, calm. A perfect psychiatrist. At first, when his mind is clouded but still cold, Will doesn’t trust him; the surface is too perfect. And if the surface is all there is, that’s boring.   
But now Will’s brain is burning and Hannibal’s calm is so…necessary. He gives himself up to it, like a fevered child surrendering to the cold hands of a school nurse. He hasn’t trusted anyone this much—at all— in so long, he can’t remember. It must have been before he was ten years old, when he still believed his father could do anything. Could save him from monsters and nightmares.   
He knows the monsters are real, now, and for a moment, blacking in and out, cold and so, so hot, wondering if he is already dead and burning, he believes Hannibal could save him from them anyway. 

And then he wakes up in the hospital and his mind is cold again. His self has set like sculpture, his melted bits of consciousness scooped up and put in a mold and frozen back until they hold their shape again. And he knows.   
He pieces it together from his dim memories, from what Jack and Alana tell him when he asks, just woken up and pretending to be innocent and sleep-fogged, but he knows and the burning he feels is a different kind of burning. A cold, slow, burn. A rage that is all his, that no one else has put in his mind.   
His mind. As though it weren’t broken and violated enough. Still. He decides where he allows it to go. He decides what disgusting murderous filth he touches. No one else.   
So he knows he did bring Gideon to Lecter’s house and he knows Lecter never checked on Alana. And he doesn’t know, but he is pretty damn sure, that Lecter and Sutcliffe knew he had encephalitis after that MRI and Lecter tortured him like a cat with a half-dead mouse for weeks.   
He could have killed someone.   
—he did kill someone. They all think he’s a hero, he saved Alana, but he remembers only shooting Garret Jacob Hobbs. Again.   
So what, did Lecter want him to kill someone? Yes, because obviously if you know the details of a man’s hallucinations, the texture of his nightmares, that his brain is almost literally on fire, and you leave him a gun and a set of car keys and a suggestion, you want him to kill someone.   
He could have killed Alana and now that he is thinking clearly he sees that Lecter would not have cared. That he might have preferred it because Will could not have come back from that. He wouldn’t have wanted to.   
So— a game. An experiment. Lecter is pushing him. This is not as easy, as effortless, as it is when he looks at a crime scene (the effort there is all in containing his revulsion at himself). His judgment is compromised because he knows Lecter, knows the face he presents to the world, that mirror. This should make it easier but it doesn’t, it’s noise.   
You’re the crime scene, Will.   
So he is.   
Lecter lied about the MRI. Why? To do an experiment. Sociopathic behavior. Sutcliffe’s death was awfully convenient, because bringing someone else into an illegal act outside of a genuine folie a deux, was the surest way to get caught. And Lecter did not seem the type to share. That didn’t mean he had killed Sutcliffe, necessarily; he might simply have led the poor girl to him. Let her madness work for him, as he had Will’s. But perhaps he had killed him.   
Why was he pushing Will? What did he want? Clearly he did not actively want Will dead, but didn’t mind if that was a consequence; Will could easily have died of encephalitis or of the risks he had taken during his blackouts and hallucinations. He wanted Will mad, dead, in prison, a murderer. Somehow destroyed and— no longer credible. He had broken into Will’s house and left a message and Will had been too clouded to care. Daring, bold. He knew exactly— almost exactly— where the line was.   
He killed Budge— in self-defense— but the trauma response was almost pitch-perfect, textbook. Too perfect, as though learned by rote.   
He pushes Will—   
—the copycat that made Will see the Shrike—   
oh, oh, OH.   
And then— Miriam Lass. Fucking around with Jack’s head that way, playing. Then showing them that Gideon wasn’t the Ripper. Educating them. Leading them down the Primrose Path. Calmly, inexorably, almost matter-of-fact. Mirroring their worst fears.  
And he’d concealed Abigail’s killing of Boyle. Which, God knew whether or not that was true. Or which parts of it. Perhaps Lecter had killed him, not Abigail, although it seemed unlike him. But he had been so difficult to see because he was so good at hiding inside others’ minds. Like Will’s inverse.   
Perhaps it hadn’t been self-defense. Perhaps— perhaps?—he was playing with Abigail, had her on a string just like Will. Of course he did. He was playing with everyone, to a greater or lesser degree. Abigail and Will were simply the most vulnerable. Elk stumbling in the herd, signaling to the wolf in the brush how easily they could be taken down.   
He could smell it on them. The potential for madness. The need to trust. He became exactly what they needed. Classic. Christ, Will, you’re an idiot. He used to be a surgeon. Of course he did. As the Ripper, he dissected bodies; as Lecter, he dissected minds. He got the same gratification out of it— ripping Will’s mind apart, extracting what he needed. 

Will hates psychoanalysis. He told Dr. Lecter he wouldn’t like him psychoanalyzed.   
He should have listened. Oh, if he wants Will snapped, if he wants Will burning, then here he is. 

He gets rid of Jack and Alana. He promises to call Lecter if he needs anything. He keeps his promise.   
He needs revenge. 

The night he gets out of the hospital, he calmly picks up the phone and calls Lecter, breathing hard, sounding hysterical, even crying a little. “The hallucinations are back, I think— or maybe— oh God, I might have killed someone, oh God, I think it’s Alana, help me, please help me.”   
Then he hangs up, pets Winston absently on the head, contemplates feeding Lecter to the dogs, and decides no, it wouldn’t be worth it and besides, he can’t do that to them. He won’t let Lecter get inside them and turn them vicious. That it happened to him is enough. 

Lecter arrives in an impressive forty-five minutes. His calm is that one note up it gets when he is pretending to be slightly panicked out of concern.   
“Will,” he says when Will answers the door, pretending to be nonfunctional. Lecter puts his arm around Will. Will kicks the door shut with his foot and presses his gun into Lecter’s spine.   
“I know,” Will says. 

There is not a negotiation. Will pushes back, propels himself away from Hannibal, and fires four times before the doctor can speak. 

Afterwards he gets a paper towel, removes the knife from Lecter’s pocket, cuts himself across the abdomen with it— lightly— and then puts it in Lecter’s hand. Then he calls Jack, pretending panic, fear, shock. 

“It was Hannibal, Jack. Dr. Lecter’s the Ripper. I— I called him for help and—I started to realize, I would have before, but the fever— he noticed, he came after me with a knife, and I— I shot him, Jack. He’s dead.” 

Will hangs up the phone and smiles.   
Interacting has never been so easy.


End file.
